Absolutely.

I'll speak about Alaska's experience, but scenic tourism took place throughout the 19th century in the United States. If you're interested in Alaska's experience with early tourism, I suggest "Touring Alaska," a paper by Frank Norris in the fall 1987 issue of the Journal Alaska History. Other good works include "The Inside Passage: A Popular Gilded Age Tour," in the April 1965 issue of Pacific Northwest Quarterly, "Gawking at the Midnight Sun: The Tourist in Early Alaska" (a 1985 work of the Alaska Historical Commission), Charles M. Taylor's 1901 book Touring Alaska and the Yellowstone, and of course John Muir's Travels in Alaska.

There are a few suggestions for the "first" scenic tourist trip to Alaska, with William Seward's 1869 voyage a common example. The consensus leans toward a trip organized in 1878 by Capt. George S. Wright to the Stikine River in Southeast Alaska. Regardless of when the trade started, pioneer tourist groups were wandering through Southeast Alaska in the early 1880s. By 1884, there was a regularly scheduled loop, the Inside Passage Tour.

That tour began in Portland or a Puget Sound port, wended its way up the coast of British Columbia and stopped in Wrangell. The gold camps of Juneau and Douglas were on the itinerary (the Juneau Gold Rush having begun in 1880 as the first rush of consequence in Alaska), as were the glaciers of Glacier Bay.

On the return leg, ships stopped at the Native village of Killisnoo and put in at Sitka, the capital of the District of Alaska, before returning south.

In 1884, 1,650 sight-seers traveled this loop. By 1890, that figure had more than tripled.

In addition to seeing the glaciers and forests of Southeast Alaska, visitors were interested in curios. In Wrangell, Killisnoo, Sitka and elsewhere, Natives and whites alike hawked Russian objects, crafts and anything else "portable as pieces of genuine Alaskana," Norris writes.

Native baskets started becoming hot commodities in the 1880s, and by the first decade of the 20th century collecting them had become a fad. Manufacturing items for the tourist trade became a thing by the end of the 19th century, and by the 1910s, people were inventing "Native" items constructed from whole cloth, such as the Billiken.

Unfortunately, during the later years of the 19th century demand for tourist items outstripped supply. This led visitors to comb through "abandoned" fish camps and villages for items to take. What these visitors didn't understand was that Native life in Alaska tended to be seasonal, with both winter and summer camps or villages. Thus, when they cut down totem poles and stole masks, boxes and tools from an "abandoned" village, they were stealing from someone who needed those things. Repatriating those objects has become a big task for Alaska Native nonprofit organizations.

By the end of the 19th century, the tourist trade was small but steady. The start of the Klondike Gold Rush disrupted it to a degree, but it soon came back bigger than ever ─ tourists had a new reason to go north, and with the construction of the White Pass and Yukon Route Railroad, they had an easy way to do it.

One of the first tourists to visit Alaska was the naturalist John Muir. When he traveled north in 1879 and 1880, he was as much an explorer and natural scientist as he was a tourist. When he returned in 1890, he traveled with tourists on tourist steamships. As he wrote on June 18, 1890:

The marvelous wealth of forests, islands, and waterfalls, the cloud wreathed heights, the many avalanche slopes and slips, the pearl-gray tones of the sky, the browns of the woods, their purple flower edges and mist fringes, the endless combinations of water and land and ever shifting clouds ─ none of these greatly interest the tourists. I noticed one of the small whales that frequent these channels and mentioned the fact, then called attention to a charming group of islands, but they turned their eyes from the islands, saying, "Yes, yes, they are very fine, but where did you see the whale?"

And on July 7, 1890 in Glacier Bay:

Another fine day; scarce a cloud in the sky. The icebergs in the bay are miraged in the distance to look like the frontal wall of a great glacier. I am writing letters in anticipation of the next steamer, the Queen.

She arrived about 2.30 P.M. with two hundred and thirty tourists. What a show they made with their ribbons and kodaks! All seemed happy and enthusiastic, though it was curious to see how promptly all of them ceased gazing when the dinner-bell rang, and how many turned from the great thundering crystal world of ice to look curiously at the Indians that came alongside to sell trinkets, and how our little camp and kitchen arrangements excited so many to loiter and waste their precious time prying into our poor hut.

No, there has been tourists visiting Niagara Falls since the 1790s, and it really started booming after the War of 1812. Within a couple decades people were complaining about the tourist traps that were crowding the view of the falls. Eventually the Canadian Government had to start regulating it and removing stuff in the immediate surroundings.

There are TONS of travel journals written in the 1800s, it was a very popular genre as many people couldn't travel. And some are by vary famous people like Dickens. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Notes

These travel journals would talk often about the Sublime (terryfying/astonishing awe), and the picturesque countrysides they'd see on their journey. There is even such a thing as the cult of the sublime, and the cult of the picturesque that arose in the 18th century. https://blantonmuseum.org/files/american_scenery/sublime_guide.pdf

There is a theory that Americans became obsessed with these natural wonders because they did not have magnificent Cathedrals and Castles of Europe. So their objects of revere became things like Yellowstone, the Grand Canyon, the Mississippi, Niagara. Their scales were unmatched in Europe.

Tangential follow-up: I just visited the Deutsches Historisches Museum the other day, and I remember seeing a painting named "tourists in Waterloo" (or something of the sort) from the 19th century. Were historically significant sites like Waterloo a popular tourist attraction? What about other war memorials? Did they play a role in the nationalistic propaganda of the day?